Friday, November 30, 2012

This past week has been quite exciting at the WLA. I was asked to transcribe some documents that recently came in. This was quite an interesting experience because the documents were near impossible to read. I had to hold them up against the light and literally attempted to define each letter. The document was so badly maintained and the print was nearly all gone. Fortunately, I was transcribing letters/cards so each one did not take as long. I want to thank the graduate students for letting me help them!

Next on the list has been my newest exhibit that I am working on. The Taproots is a non-profit organization dedicated to educating young adults/teens on safe sex and also providing services to young parents.

This is a description of the group from my display.

Taproots was founded by Monica Cahill, BVM, and began as a center for
teenage mothers in the rectory of St. Thomas Aquinas Church in 1978. In
1980, Taproots (Teen-Age Parents Realizing Ongoing Orientation Toward
Success) moved to a six-room flat at 2424 W. Polk St. Located on
Chicago’s West Side, Taproots was offered its services to help ease the
difficulties of teen-age pregnancy and single parenthood.

Taproots’
initial focus on teenage pregnancy eventually expanded to include an
outreach program which serviced the entire community. Its three-pronged
program included empowerment training for young mothers, a child
development laboratory for parenting instruction, and adolescent
pregnancy forums held throughout the community. Taproots focused on
skills training in parenting, nutrition, hygiene, career awareness, and
assistance in reaching proper community resources to help teenage
parents.

This week, I decided to change my mind on the organization I will focus on. I felt compelled to research the Feminist Forum because it has been non-existent this year, but they actually held their first meeting last night. I attended and the group was very pleased to know that I am making an exhibit for them.

Here are some photos and papers I am including into my display.

These are only a few examples of what I have been going through this past week. It has all been very interesting because this is an inspirational and respected organization at our school and I am able to trace its origins. The downfall to the collection we have at the WLA is that we hold information from 1995 to 2002. This leaves a ten year gap which does not allow me to look into what they have been working on recently. I have contacted the WSGS department, but they told me that they do not have a lot of information on file. Something specific I wanted to point out is that in the photo posted above, Gloria Steinem attended Loyola. This woman has been active in feminist issues in the United States for quite some time, so I hope my readers enjoy learning about her in my display.

Sunday, November 11, 2012

Greetings viewers!

I hope you all had a restful weekend. I have finally been able to finish my latest project on Carol Ronen this past Friday. However, I am still waiting to hear back on some edits from my supervisor so I will post the link next week. I hope you are all excited to see that display because this woman was extremely active in issues such as same sex rights and child/adolescent care. I had honestly never heard of her before, but I could not believe everything she has done. This is one of the first times when I realized how difficult it was creating a display for a person. There were just too many things to share and I also did not want my piece to be too long. As a result, I did struggle more than usual with creating this display, but I hope you all enjoy it.

As for this upcoming week! I am still going through our collections trying to look for areas I have not covered. As a part of this internship, I want to really expand my understanding of women leadership through a multitude of lenses. Therefore, the collection on Church Women United Peoria has really caught my attention. This is a church organization founded in 1941 that represents the Roman Catholic and Protestant faith. They identify as a racially, culturally, theologically inclusive Christian women’s movement, celebrating unity in diversity and working for a world of peace and justice. There are still operating today with over 1, 200 local and state units in the US and Puerto Rico. The fact that this group works specifically in Puerto Rico is something that caught my attention right away. There are a lot of material in our archives that speaks to the work committed within the United States, and so I believe that Puerto Rico would provide a different insight. Their culture is different than ours and their national language is not even English. Although, this may already seem as common knowledge, I believe this would greatly affect the inner components of an organization. For the next week, I will be going through all of their documented notes from meetings and programs they held. I do not believe that this collection contains photos, so I will need to search on the web. For example, some events that I want to discuss in my next display would be May Fellowship Day (May), World Day of Prayer (March), andWorld Community Day (November).Well, I hope everyone has a great week and thank you so much for reading. I appreciate all of the support.Take care

Friday, November 2, 2012

As for today, I have been going through the manuscript collections trying to discover the next piece I would like to work on. I have decided on Carol Ronen and for some general background information, she served as an Illinois State Representative in the 17th District from 1993-2000, prior to which she served as Executive Director of the Chicago Commission on Women. Carol was then appointed to the Illinois State Senate for District 7 in 2000 after the resignation of her predecessor, Arthur Berman, and was subsequently elected without an opponent. In 2006, she won reelection by defeating Republican Frank Thomas. In 2007, she announced that she would be resigning as Senator and officially stepped down on February 10, 2008. I was also reading online about her resignation and I came across something that discussed a scandal between her and Governor Blagojevich. I have yet to delve into this topic so I do not have much to share as of right now. Today, I was able to pull up some photos from the archives so I will display these below.

These are just some photos that I was able to scan but there is still a lot of work to do on this project. Please stay tuned until next week. Thank you for reading.

Saturday, October 27, 2012

Good Evening!

It is wonderful to be back on here. I hope everyone is doing well. I actually had a tremendous week because I was able to finish my display on the WILPF and I have become working on the life of Joan Heath Fortner. I have just finished writing a little summary about her that I will include in my final display. It still requires a little bit of editing, but this is what I have so far.

Joan Heath
Fortner was born in 1932 to Mr. and Mrs. Norbert A. Heath. She is an alumna of
Immaculata High School (1950), Mundelein College (1954, BFA), the New York
Fashion Academy (1955), and Loyola University (1979, M.A. in Education). From a
young age, Fortner was extremely passionate about art and she actually became
the youngest person to win the Chicago Tribune American Fashions Competition. In
addition to this award, she was the 1950 recipient of the Bishop O’Brien
scholarship to the Art Institute in Chicago. In 1953 she won a second
scholarship to the New York Fashion Academy for a design she submitted to a
contest by the Evans Fur Company.

During her
lifetime, Fortner has been involved in art organizations in Chicago and suburbs
for years. She is currently the president of the Des Plaines Art Guild and the
executive director of Art Cubes, a nonprofit art service organization funded by
the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs and the Illinois Arts Council that
brings the arts to older adults. Due to the dedication to her work, Fortner has
won many awards and today she is still extremely active in her community. Along
with teaching art classes, she is currently working on watercolor and acrylic
paintings. This exhibit will highlight various works of Fortner and the impact she has made on Art and Fashion.

I am extremely excited to continue my work on this project because this individual is quite different from anyone I have worked on before. She is quite talented in the Arts and has this immense passion for fashion. I share this interest with Fortner in that I am a major fan of runways and clothing designs so it is quite an honor to work on this exhibit. I hope I do her justice! I will continue to work on this next week so please stated tuned!

As for my work this week, I have been spending a lot of going through correspondences and images, so the process is taking a bit longer than I had expected. Although the archives are stored at Loyola and that Chicago had its own branch of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, there is not a lot of information available. In my display, I will do the best that I can to include information about the programs held in Chicago. I wanted to upload some interesting photos and other information I have been looking at this week.

These only represent a few of the images I have been going through during the past week. I am designing a display that will show one image and then switch off to a letter or correspondence. There is actually quite a lot of textual material that I have to work with. This organization is quite interesting in that it focuses on a wide variety of issues. If you look at the beginning images, these are all of magazines and their covers represent the different projects of the WILPF. They have focused especially on ending nuclear warfare, world hungry, sexual assault,etc. Overall, there is a theme of empowering women to enact change within their communities. I have even checked out their site this past week and they only employ women. On their international office website, their employee statement for internships reads, "*The internships are reserved for women in recognition of the fact
that women remain largely excluded from positions concerned with
questions of foreign policy, international relations and management,
although their presence in these crucial areas is much needed. Priority
is given to women between the ages of 20 and 30." I will keep everyone updated as I continue to work on my display. Thank you for reading!Take care

**All information was provided by Women and Leadership Archives and http://www.wilpfinternational.org/

Friday, October 12, 2012

So the first thing I would love to share is the link for my newest post!

http://wla-archives.tumblr.com/

Please check it out and learn about the interesting life of Mary Agnes Curran, OSF.

As I mentioned last week, I have begun working on my newest project which focuses on the history of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF). This organization has been around for almost a century and our own Jane Addams, founder of the Hull House, was instrumental in the creation of the WILPF. This group actually met in Holland for the first time, but their main offices are in New York City, New York and Geneva, Switzerland. Today, they are present in thirty-seven countries! WILPF has promoted global
cooperation and women’s equality and empowerment since its founding.
Unfortunately, the branch in Chicago ceased operation in 1995, but there is still a good amount of material at Piper Hall that speaks to the work they did. My job for this week and the following is to sort through their material. Thus far, I have been reading through some of the correspondence letters and what I am beginning to look at are events and various political activism papers. In total, there is a selection of newsletters, mailings, meeting minutes, Principles and Policies, promotional materials, programs and events, newspaper clippings and political activism papers. Also present are newspaper clippings and promotional materials for other women’s groups. I am extremely excited to delve into the information and create a display that highlights the contributions this organization has made. I especially do not want to forget that the WILPF focused on several prevailing political issues, including nuclear disarmament, Cold War and post-Cold War international relations, reduction of Defense spending and funding of domestic human-needs programs, peace in the Middle East, and racism. Although the information stored in Piper Hall may be more restricted since many of these problems were international, I will still dedicate a substantial amount of time to investigating any participation the Chicago branch had.

Please wait patiently as I begin to research this international organization.